One of the most telling examples of how Palin represents more of the same “George Bush mentality” came tonight when she gave voice to the time-worn political adage: “I’ll answer the question I wish you’d asked, instead of what you did ask.” Usually, a politician doesn’t brag about the fact he or she doesn’t have to actually answer the question, but Palin brazenly staked out her claim to be non-responsive in a way that harkened back to Bogart’s Treasure of Sierra Madre.

‘Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!’

She did it again when she tried to circumvent global warming by saying she didn’t want to “argue” about it. That time, Biden called her on it, and to great effect! She did remarkably well tonight, considering that a “good” performance is probably one that doesn’t need substantial rewrite to wind up in an SNL script.

But Biden was excellent at the long, slow, deliberate process of remiding Americans why we’re where we are, and that McCain was instrumental in getting us here, and the instapoll numbers are bearing that out. Even on the Faux News website.

A few days ago, I resurrected an old CD that had come out of Hurricane Frances with the paper CD cover insert adhered to the CD itself. Some glass cleaner and hard work brought it to life again.

It was Simply Red’s debut album Picture Book, and I was amazed in revisiting the lyrics in Red’s version of “Money’s Too Tight to Mention,” how everything old is new again.

“I been laid off from work my rent is due
My kids all need brand new shoes
So I went to the bank to see what they could do
They said son looks like bad luck got a hold on you”

Simply Red’s awesome version of the Valentine Brothers’ original composition came at a time when the US economy was slowly taking away from the middle class and giving to the rich, in a frenzy that ultimately wound up in bank failures:

“Were talking bout Reaganomics
Oh lord down in the Congress
They’re passing all kinds of bills
From up there on Capitol hill, we’ve tried it”

Yes, everything old is new again, right down the age of the Republican candidate who would continue the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

“Were talking bout the dollar bill
And that old man who’s over the hill”

Asian and Australian markets are up as we pass Monday noon in the far East, suggesting that talk of a proposed government intervention for the investment bankers who sliced and diced bad debt trying to make it look good may be forestalling a panic. But its also forestalling something else.

We need a corrective action in our country so that we start producing things of value, and living within our own productivity and wealth, and none of the suggestions coming from any of the gurus dares broach that fundamental weakness in our system.

We’ve been in a downward spiral for years, afraid admission of the problem will fuel it. But the longer we remain in denial, the worse it gets for us.

The American public has, since the 60s, felt it can simply vote away the problems. It can vote less taxes, while the elected officials pile on the debt. It can vote cheap energy, while officials either destabilize foreign oil-rich governments, or burn our own energy-rich nation first. If we cloud the world with greenhouse gases, we can use our political will to rewrite the scientific journals and muzzle anyone who dares tell the truth.

But the longer one forestalls that intervention, the greater the secondary problems. When we prop up crooks, liars, the incompent, the inept and the ineffective because they’re intrinsic to our system and our economic system depends on the status quo, the more we become unable to ever recover. One day we will have to reap what we have sown. So far, it looks like it won’t be today. Tomorrow, the price will be higher, but that’s tomorrow.

Palm Beach County is back once again providing comic relief through its Supervisor of Elections Office. The fact is, beyond the hanging chads and the punch-tabs that don’t line up against candidate’s names (which netted Pat Buchanan more votes here than even he thought he deserved), we just don’t seem to be able to count.

After weeks of hue and cry over a local municipal judgeship election, and two recounts, we’ve stopped what was to be the final recount because the votes just don’t add up. Now, we’ll be flying a strike force from the Sequoia folks who make the voting machines into the county to try and help us. Maybe we just need a math teacher. No precinct left behind, anyone?

Or maybe we just need the new elections supervisor that we just voted in. Arthur Anderson (not related to the former big-five accounting firm which also couldn’t count) was voted out in the last election and is about to step aside. If you trust the vote that is.

When the Sarah Palin apologists tried to explain away her hedge to Charlie Gibson’s “Bush doctrine” question on her first major television interview, the talking point went that it was unfair that when a similar “Bush doctrine” question was asked during the ABC Democratic debate, it was defined. But Charlie Gibson didn’t define it when it was asked of Sarah Palin.

Of course, one was a real-time statement the audience was sure to hear, the other was a raw interview which would be heavily edited for time, and the questions and question definitions would either be eliminated, re-shot, or handled in voice-over.

Today, on Meet the Press, when Tom Brokaw asked Michael Bloomberg about Joe Biden, adding “vice-presidential candidate with Barack Obama,” as an appositive, Bloomberg quipped, “I know who he is.”

There was a time that interviewing a major political figure, you could assume you could talk in shorthand. They were busy, and would be more than happy to launch into a long explanation at even a pregnant pause.

But Sarah Palin, and more important, her apologists, have moved the goal post. Now, if you don’t ask the question the same way for the candidates as you do when you’re trying to teach the audience, you’re unfair.

This weekend, its the premier event of Parkerfest in New York, the yearly homage to New York’s most wittily sarcastic historical figure, Dorothy Parker. This year, its a jazz-age lawn party on Governor’s Island. In Los Angeles, there’s a guided tour. Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood, which begins at the Washington Mutual/McDonald’s center at 8152 Sunset in West Hollywood.

Mrs. Parker was a fan of neither banks nor fast food, but the site has a rather rich history, because Mrs. Parker and Robert Benchley lived there for a while (as did Orson Welles and a host of other notables,) when it was the Garden of Allah which then was made famous again to a new generation by Joni Mitchell who sang “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The parking lot was soon followed by a two-story savings and loan which today is a multi-story LA-style office building.

Mrs. Parker was one of the early larger-than-life characters that shone through modern media. To those who saw her in glimpses and short texts she was brilliance personified, but in too hefty a dose, she was tart and bitter, and it may be why she never had a hit play or novel; her forte was the review, the poem and the short story.

She was one of the early celebrities who gained and kept fame by feeding free content to the daily press. Franklin Pierce Adams’ New York Times column “The Conning Tower,” made use of quips from the witty and famous, often gathered at a “roundtable” held at New York’s Algonquin hotel. One wag said FPA (Franklin Pierce Adams was an early adopter of initials-as-name) raised Parker from a couplet.

But like many talented people whose intensity makes a few words shine, a full dose overwhelms, and today she’s remembered mostly for her oneliners. Asked to use horticulture in a sentence, she quipped, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” Deferred to at a doorway with the phrase, “Age before beauty,” she walked through and retorted: “No, pearls before swine.”

But like so many rapscallions, she was quickly forgotten in death. Her friend Lillian Hellman didn’t pick her ashes up from the crematorium for 10 years. They languished another 15 in her lawyer’s office, where her intellectual property was more important than her physical remains. She finally found a home at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore (she gave the MLK foundation her estate at her death).

Dorothy Parker is perfect for the days of the 30 second soundbyte and the Internet sigline, so when the Dorothy Parker Society brought her to the web in the late 90s, she might actually have liked it (though she never would let on.) She was adamant that she not be lionized in death. But then she was adamant about a lot of things. That was her curse and her salvation.

[Don Barrett on his subscription site LAradio.com debates a column by Paul Bond in the Hollywood Reporter (another subscription site) and asks if radio is to blame for its ills, or if its just the economy. I've got a slightly different view.]

A few months ago, deep in the comments section of a diary about Air America on DailyKos (that lefty blog the right loves to hate) a poster mentioned that she’d received an ARB diary. She was going to make sure that all the liberal talk shows she listens to got the full credit they deserve. Problem was: she didn’t listen to any of them on the radio.

She listened to them as podcasts. As the discussion proceeded, she listed all the reasons that podcasts were so much better than listening on the radio. It was probably beyond her why she wasn’t really helping Air America by filling out the diary as if she listened. When even the folks who like audio-only programming move on from radio to other distribution media, its the death knell.

I don’t know for sure why Clear Channel went private, but my guess is that they’re pretty smart cookies even though they’re widely reviled, and they know or should know that advertsing-supported radio is dead, and to not tell the stockholders might be actionable.

Radio stayed alive the way the telegram and the landline analog telephone stayed alive for so long; bandwidth was expensive. Today we send emoticons back and forth on chat channels that take more bandwidth than a telegram took just 50 years ago.

Radio always existed because there wasn’t a more information-rich medium to fill its shoes, from the days it repurposed vaudeville, through the days it played niche music, to the days the public’s ears became sophisticated enough to tell AM was inferior, and it was relegated to the bellicose screeching of the right wing blowhards, religion, and foreign language.

Who left talk radio first? The progressives. Who is leaving music radio? The kids. Sure, some of it is that they didn’t grow up with it. But the rest is that what they grew up understanding (mp3 players and texting cell phones) are far more interesting because they’re interactive.

One hundred years ago, instantaneous communication was so stunning that a transmitter and receiver in a room together “with no connection between them save the ether” could cause an audience to gasp. Today, there’s a cellphone in everybody’s pocket.

I know many of us love radio, usually because we were in it or it was a big part of our lives when our world was young, but the medium was lucky enough to have two golden ages. We’re in the throes of a media technological revolution that is as dramatic as the early demonstrations of radio was to the horse-drawn generation. The telegraph is dead, newspapers and radio aren’t far behind.

So, I’d say radio isn’t at fault for its ills, nor is it the economy. Its the public that, just as they finally grasped that FM was better–over RCA’s powerful objections–has finally grasped that radio isn’t the best place to go for anything anymore.

Could radio have kept itself alive longer? Probably. But its like any dying industry. Do you stop pouring the money into it, and take the profits until they dry up, or do you try and prop it up by massive infusions of cash even when you know there’s a fundamental flaw in the technology. I think radio lived a long and rich life, and we ought to prepare ourselves to give it the final tribute it deserves.